Trophy for Eagles (56 page)

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Chapter 9

Downey, California/October 4, 1934

Like an aging high school beauty queen primping for a reunion, the
distressed Beech Staggerwing sat in the back of the Roget hangar, its
dignity destroyed. The firewall was festooned with wires and tubes,
and an asbestos blanket covered the windscreen to fend off the sparks
that flew as Frank Bandfield welded up a new engine mount.

Hadley slipped on dark goggles and watched approvingly as the
torch left a perfectly smooth bead. The deep blue shade of the
goggles was a perfect complement to Hadley's sad, reflective mood, the goggles turning the torch's flame into a mirror reflecting all their
efforts of the past. It seemed like only yesterday he'd watched Bandy
doing exactly the same work on the original
Rocket,
sweating to get
it ready to fly to Paris. So much had happened since then—the races
at Cleveland, the first flight of the RC-3, the deliveries to Allied
Airlines—yet financially they were headed back almost exactly to
where they had started.

The euphoria of the sixty-plane order Mahew had given for the RC-3 had led them to expand the plant and its work force too
rapidly. Ironically, it was the very size of that initial success that was
now giving them problems. They had created a full manufacturing plant to deliver aircraft at the rate of ten per month, but had not
since gained any other orders for the airplane. Douglas Aircraft had
quite simply trumped their ace with its DC-2, sewing up the
marketplace, and Roget Aircraft was trapped in the classic aviation
dilemma: a large work force, a huge payroll, and no backlog of orders.

No outsider could have guessed this by looking at the plant, for
the aisles were still filled with planes in the process of being built. But the simple truth was that unless there were some sizable orders
for new aircraft in the next few weeks, they were going to have to
start laying people off as they began the process of shutting the plant
down.

It had startled Hadley to find that success was far more difficult to
deal with than failure. Before the "big order," Roget and Bandfield
had been able to keep body and soul together with the survival
techniques they'd learned over the years. They would do odd jobs,
charter flights, and repair aircraft and cars. Now the focus was
shifted entirely away from themselves onto the work force which
depended upon them for its livelihood.

Hadley roused himself from his uncharacteristic reverie and said,
"Your pay runs pretty high for doing a welder's work, doesn't it,
Bandy?"

Bandfield's nod showed that he had heard. He didn't interrupt his fierce concentration on the job at hand. Working at night on the
Beechcraft was a relief from the frantic pressures of the day.. As he
watched, the blue-black metal glowed red, then white as it fused. He remembered all his father had taught him about craftsmanship. George Bandfield had been a wild-eyed dreamer, but he played
machine tools the way Paderewski played a piano. Even as the two
pieces of metal merged into the stout angle he sought, he recalled
how closely his father had supervised his work, rejecting any that
wasn't perfect. Like any smart-aleck kid, he'd resented it at the time;
now he knew it had paid off. Recognition sparked like the torch; it
wasn't only craftsmanship his dad had taught, but philosophy,
probably shaping his attitude about selling safe, well-proven aircraft
as much as Millie's crash had done. So Slim Lindbergh was probably right when he had said his dad had influenced his political arguments.

Finished with the bead, he snapped up his welder's mask and grinned. "I've had a lot of good times in this bucket." The thought
of Patty's athletic sex-at-altitude program stirred him. "And I'd never
forgive myself if something happened to my girl in an airplane I'd
worked on."

He flipped his mask down, then up again. "You know this
airplane is twice as fast as the Nieuports her dad flew in the war?
Who'd believe a woman would be flying something like this?"

"Yeah, lots of progress in airplanes, but none in business. If we
don't get some more orders we'll be starving to death again. I thought we'd broken out of that rut."

Bandfield nodded, sharing Roget's sorrow and anxiety over the
roller-coaster ride of the aircraft business.

"Well, maybe I'll learn something at Wright Field that will help.
And maybe you can sell Howard on buying an airline and outfitting
it with Roget Aircraft planes. I know he's wanted to get into the airline business for years, ever since he flew for TWA."

"I think that's part of our problem, Bandy. We depended too
much on Hughes in the past. That's why I'm willing to take the time
to work on his racer. But I don't think we can depend on him now. The only thing to do is come up with another design, something smaller that doesn't take a big work crew to build in quantity. We
could afford to design a fighter, maybe, or a trainer. Henry Caldwell
was always trying to get me to design a trainer for the Air Corps."

"Well, Hadley, we'll swing something. Right now, though, I've got to get back to work. Patty is on my ass all the time to get this thing finished. She's not too happy that I only work on it after hours."

Hadley examined the bright yellow Beech appreciatively, letting
the beauty of its lines restore his humor. He asked, "Which engine are you installing now?"

"It's a six-hundred-and-ninety-horsepower Wright Cyclone. I'll
tweak it a little bit until it delivers seven-fifty, and Patty will have the
fastest biplane in the country, maybe the world."

Roget ran his hand over the bulldog-jawed lower wing, which gave the Staggerwing its name. "Will she be able to handle it?"

"No problem in the air, and any Staggerwing's a problem on the ground. She's got about fifty hours in it, and is doing a good job. She'll be all right. If there was a problem, I wouldn't let her go."

Roget laughed. "Yeah, I know how much attention she pays to what you say—about like what Clarice does to me."

The older man turned and bounded off to the tool room. He
doubted if Patty would really be able to master the airplane. It would
be bad enough if Bandy lost another woman in an aircraft accident,
impossibly worse if he felt he had been the cause.

Bandfield turned back to his torch. As with any task, he
approached the welding with a single-minded intensity, a tidal wave
of concentration that swamped the event and usually anyone associ
ated with it. When he could not be exactly focused—in the bath,
walking to work, driving—he tended to wander mentally through a
portfolio of ideas, setting them in order, shaping them to be a task
that could then be done. It was another legacy from his father. They
would sit in the woods, waiting for a deer to come by, and his father
would whisper to him all the things that needed to get done, what they were going to do with the deer, how they would cook it, and, always, with whom they would share it. Not a Christian, George
Bandfield had nevertheless always more than tithed his possessions,
taking care of anyone who needed it.

Patty had been waiting for thirty minutes when she saw Bandy
appear at the door, wiping his hands on a handkerchief, brow furrowed. She honked the horn of the cream-and-red Auburn Speedster, a car whose curves suited her own perfectly.

"Hey, ye old absent-minded professor, over here."

He looked up, genuinely surprised, then glanced at his watch. "God, honey, I'm sorry I'm late. Been waiting long?"

"Just the usual half hour."

A familiar surge of pleasure washed over him. He was content for the first time ever with his love life. Patty's highly charged eroticism
matched his own, and they enjoyed an intensity of lovemaking that continued to surprise him. Their life was spiced by wild arguments
that led to name-calling, dish-throwing, and door-slamming, and
almost always dissolved into a quick, heated tumble right where
they were—the kitchen, the car, wherever. And when it was over—
the fighting or the loving—they could talk endlessly about every
thing.

A bursting hot whiff of the local White Castle's greasy fried onions bubbled around him as he walked to the car, whacking his appetite as a jockey whips a horse.

"Let's eat. How about a steak at Pancho's?"

She pointed to a bag of groceries. "I've got a two-inch-thick
Porterhouse and a box of mushrooms. Forty cents a pound for the
steak, but so what. It's been a bad day—a letter from my mother
worrying about all sorts of things."

"Like what?"

"Like will the airplane be too much for me, am I getting enough sleep, and if your intentions are honorable."

"The answer to all three is no. But I could make an exception for the last one."

Laughing, she turned left toward Santa Monica.

"Where are we headed?"

"To the beach. I've borrowed a cabin for the weekend. I'm giving
you one more chance to, see if you like playing man and wife with
me. If you do, we're going to see a justice of the peace pretty soon."

"A JP? We ought to have a big wedding, invite everybody."

She winced, remembering the wedding in Orleans. "No thanks.
I've done that once too often. Let's just get Hadley and Clarice to be
witnesses and do everything quietly."

"What about your flying?" He meant: Are you going to give it up,
as I want you to do?

She took her eyes off the road only long enough to look at him and say, "What about yours?" It was a complete message.

The weekend had gone predictably well, and two weeks later they
were married in a simple morning ceremony in Riverside. Clarice Roget insisted on her Episcopal priest conducting the ceremony in the St. Francis Chapel of the Mission Inn. The inn, done in
traditional Southern California-Spanish formula, had come to be a
gathering place for both military and civilian flyers. The custom had begun with a series of rollicking wakes, when saddened comrades
would gather to toast the latest death. In time, the inn was adopted
by flyers as the appropriate place to drink, have a romantic rendez
vous, or, less frequently, to get married.

Clarice was terribly pleased with herself for choosing the little
nondenominational chapel, for she knew that its decorations in
cluded a gilded wooden altar and nine genuine Tiffany windows. In
good times and in bad, no matter what Hadley had earned, Clarice
had lived an impoverished life. Aviation had drained their finances
like a major illness, and she had watched all the money go for
"necessities" like tools, parts, and payrolls. For years she had lusted for a Tiffany lamp, to her a glowing symbol of luxury and taste. She knew she would never have one simply because Hadley would never
understand how it related to airplanes. Having Tiffany windows in
the chapel served as a substitute, and was in its own way a personal
victory for her.

There was a small reception, during the course of which Hadley
managed to bring Bandfield back through the stuccoed archways of
the inn to the fabled Flyers' Wall, where famous and not-so-famous
flyers were honored.

"Come take a look at this, Bandy." The beige stucco wall was
covered with ten-inch-long copper wings, each one signed by a well-known aviator. Other walls were filled with signed photos of flyers from the early days of aviation in California. All the aviation
greats and near-greats were there. Roget ran his finger along the wall, calling out the names—Glenn L. Martin, Lincoln Beachey, Hap Arnold, "Doc" Young, Jimmy Wedell, Jimmy Doolittle. Half the photos were marked with a simple black ribbon slanted across the upper right-hand corner.

They were bantering back and forth when Roget pointed to the picture of Millie Duncan, standing with Jack Winter near the
Golden Eagle,
cute as a button in her fake military outfit, looking up at the stars.

Bandfield was visibly staggered—he'd heard of the Flyers' Wall,
but he'd had no idea that Millie was included. His jaw dropped as
he flushed with irritation; the photo was the same one that had been
run in the
Oakland Tribune,
the one he had reproached her about.